As we plan for our 2021 events, we continue to find that we sit at the intersection of so many great ideas and too little time to pursue them all!

Of course, that's probably an enviable place to be. We'd all be in a much poorer place as a species if good ideas were highly scarce. At the same time, it also makes it more important for us to continually curate the ideas that are best suited to our current time and place in history. Especially as we start to emerge from the pent-up nature of the pandemic, we anticipate that people will be even hungrier for the types of ideas that help us make sense of the next step. We have lots to recover from, and a vast number of choices to make as we attempt to move forward as societies in a post-pandemic world.

As current news reports are constantly reminding us, our journey with COVID-19 is far from over.

Many of us are likely tired of living through a major historical event and continally unprecedented (modern) times. The urge to get back to "normal" is strong, even though we don't know what that will mean for us going forward, or when it will happen.

We're still forced to be physically distanced by COVID, but that doesn't stop us from being connected around great ideas!

Sharing ideas that matter is actually even more important now than ever, and our ENGAGE: Connected event gave us an opportunity to explore ways we can do that until we get a chance to get back together in larger groups.

What does a spa, an urban planning consultancy and a bus loaded with fruits and veggies have in common? Lourdes Juan builds teams that solve problems across communities!

Lourdes is a Calgary-based entrepreneur and planner who oversees dozens of staff and hundreds of volunteers at the diverse companies and non-profits she’s founded including Soma Hammam & Spa, Hive Developments and the Leftovers Foundation.

Shocked at how much unsold bread a single bakery in Calgary had at closing time, Lourdes founded Leftovers in 2012. Today, the large charity works with nearly 100 Alberta restaurants, bakeries and grocers to keep more than 300,000 pounds of edible food out of landfills every single year by repurposing it through partnerships with local businesses or redirecting excess food to hungry Albertans who need it the most. In 2019, Lourdes and her team launched Fresh Routes, a social enterprise that creates new ways of providing healthy and affordable food to Canadians including through Calgary’s first mobile grocery store.